"There's a disgust reflex. People are creeped out but don't want to admit it, so they overcompensate. Yes yes yes, it's fine. Let them in."

Psychotherapist Stella O'Malley theorizes about why women support males in women's sports

UPDATED: Just came across a video of a mob of high school students in Florida supporting a trans-identified boy in girls’ volleyball. I put it at the bottom of this post. See what you think.

This is Part Two, or the post I intended to write in the first place about Why Some Women Support Males in Women’s Sports. That’s because this time, I got hold of psychotherapist and director of Genspect Stella O’Malley by phone and we spoke more at length. She works in private practice, writes on the topics of sex, gender, parenting, and family dynamics, and recently organized a multidisciplinary Genspect conference.

I asked her to apply her expertise to the counter-intuitive circumstance of women, even women involved in sports—the Billie Jean Kings, the Women’s Sports Foundations, the Oiselles, the Megan Rapinoes, the sports journalists of the world—who support males in women’s sports. What is the thought here? Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

So, when I asked why do you support trans-identified men in women’s sports, I’d either get no response or maybe a slogan—a trans woman is a woman. Do you think people believe men somehow magically become women?

In my view, yes, there are an amazing number of people who think that men do become women. I think they’re not thinking very much, really. That maybe being trans is some version of being gay. That inside they’re really women. So there’s this thought that trans is the new gay, so young people, young women especially, are eager to affirm a trans identity. They want to be seen as progressive.

And, I think most people know very little about it [transgenderism] and for that reason it seems exotic. Like anorexia or self-harm was back in the 1980s. Nobody understood it. If you talked about self-harm people would say, Oooo, who would do that? It’s taken time to understand what’s going on.

I also think there’s a disgust reflex [with regard to transgenderism]. The disgust reflex is one of the primary responses in life and one that people don’t want to admit. It freaks them out, they’re creeped out but don’t want to admit it, so they overcompensate—yes yes yes, that’s fine. Here’s this very odd person who needs kindness. There won’t be many of them. It’ll be fine. They don’t want to think about it, they just want to shut the conversation down fast and move on. When I’ve wanted to have a conversation about this, males in women’s sports or whatever, people are uncomfortable. They’re impatient with me and want me to stop talking. That’s what led me to this theory.

One way to shut the conversation down fast is to use slogans. People hide behind them because they don’t want to go into a complicated place. They use slogans as a shield to what’s relevant, to what’s going on.

What about female athletes?

Sports people tend to be very committed to sport. They don’t to tend to be interested in other aspects of life, and this [transgenderism] is a very complex subject. Often they just don’t have time. To be a truly elite athlete you need single-minded focus on your sport. There’s an instinctive understanding that you should avoid political conflict to do well on the pitch or the track. Stay out of politics; it’s a time waster and an energy taker. That’s the zeitgeist, and it’s unfortunate.

I’m more surprised about the veteran sportswriter, often a man in his 50s who is phenomenally well informed about sports. I’m surprised men haven’t said, This is fundamentally unfair to women. Sports are fundamentally about fairness. Without fairness, you don’t have sports, and these journalists know this. Male journalists haven’t covered themselves with glory here. Women are on the back foot; they don’t want to sound like whiners. Women are afraid to blame childbirth or periods. They will never blame any unfairness on being female, but I’m disappointed male journalists haven’t joined the discussion.

To be fair, I know from personal experience that many mainstream outlets will only publish an inclusive narrative regarding trans-identified males in women’s sports. So even if the writer agrees it’s unfair, the higher ups at the magazine or newspaper are calling the shots.

Right. Of course, I’ve been in this world long enough to know that some editors have trans kids. These kids are quite privileged, very wealthy. The parents are in positions of power—editors, business leaders, legislators. It’s frightening.

Going back to why some women support males in women’s sports, I wonder if you can comment on this: A boy in Maine ran in a girls’ regional cross country race placing 6th. The same time would have gotten him 215th in the boys race. A girl who also ran in that race wrote a letter to the newspaper titled There is space in sports for transgender athletes—especially at the youth level. Her argument was that the boy’s (she used she/her pronouns) presence was irrelevant to all the other female runners. If a girl ran 21:07, for example, she would have done that with or without the trans athlete in the field. I don’t understand how the girl who wrote this letter could think that way.

That’s rubbish. Everything about sports is about advantage and fairness. There’s nothing about that that makes sense. I suspect it has something to do with the female desire to keep community together. Arguably estrogen has something to do with that. Some people say girls are socialized to play nice, to keep the peace. It’s also evolutionary. I hope she comes to realize, there’s this cascade of realization, that discomfort [with males in women’s sport] is appropriate, and that most people agree with you. JK Rowling, women who stand up for women’s rights receive significantly more abuse than men who say the same things. This girls is thinking she will get abuse if she talks about unfairness, and she will, she will get abuse. So avoidance [of abuse] plays a part. Girls have been trained to think of their femaleness as unrelated to their performance. They pride themselves on being tough, that they can train harder, not be a whiner. I love that Irish runner Sonia O’Sullivan spoke up. And Martina Navratilova, after educating herself, saying women need fairness.

I have to ask—Billie Jean King? The heck?

It was probably a chain of trust thing. Billie Jean King has a chain of trust—people to whom she goes, like a personal assistant, a resident expert to advise her. Very often, these people are women in their 30s. Public relations is thick with young women which is a demographic very prone to affirm men who claim to be women. By their 40s, they’ve started to pull back, but by that time, they’re often out of the business. That might be what happened with Billie Jean King.

UPDATE: Here’s a video of students from Monarch High School in Florida angrily protesting the fact that their principal was reassigned for letting a trans-identified boy play on the girls’ volleyball team, which is against the law recently passed protecting single sex sports. (Do not in any way assume I agree with even one other breath DeSantis has taken). So one assumes these students are in favor of trans-identified boys in girls sports. But if you read the hundreds and hundreds of comments to the video, you get a more accurate picture. That the students just liked their principal. That the vast majority of students will take any opportunity to ditch class. That most of the students didn’t walk out. That the media was inaccurately painting this as widespread support of trans-identified boys in girls’ sports. That protests in support of women’s rights get very little media coverage. I added this to this post because sometimes a few noisy people, or a single high-profile person, who supports trans-identified males in women’s sports may be amplified to appear larger than it really is.